BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Volume 1, Number 1 (Summer 1999)

Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.
448 pp. ISBN 06774194462.

Reviewed by Talia Schaffer
San Francisco State University

Ellis Hanson's Decadence and Catholicism
is part of the new wave of books reconsidering the 1890s in light
of the sexual and political turmoil at our own fin de siècle,
including Elaine Showalter's Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture
at the Fin de Siècle (1990), Richard Dellamora's Masculine
Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (1990),
Alan Sinfield's The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and
the Queer Moment (1994), and Jonathan Freedman's Professions
of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture
(1990). Decadence and Catholicism takes on an ambitious project:
it argues that at the end of the nineteenth century, Catholicism coexisted
harmoniously with homosexuality in the writings of decadent men.

In this era of slashed publishers' budgets Harvard University Press
deserves credit for fostering, and Hanson for writing, a capacious
and leisurely study with plenty of room for rambling, for stylistic
experimentation, for explorations and tangents and suggestions. Hanson
has apparently read everything each of his subjects ever wrote, which
allows his chapters to cover a broad range of texts, tracing how their
characteristic obsessions broaden, alter, and dissipate over a lifetime
of writing. Hanson is as comfortable with Continental literature as
with the British tradition, covering a period stretching from the
1860s through modernism. His 'decadence' is an international and wide-ranging
movement.

Decadence and Catholicism begins with an introduction attempting
to define 'decadence,' but its first full chapter is one which traces
Wagner's influence over a wide range of poets and in particular charts
Verlaine's oscillations between 'saint' and 'sinner,' as well as using
Eve Sedgwick's notion of 'shame' to read Baudelaire. This fairly miscellaneous
chapter is not quite as satisfying as the next chapter, which focuses
on Huysmans. Hanson explores the way Huysmans's idea of 'hysteria'
anticipates Freud's and stresses the way Huysmans allied satanism
and sodomy not only to each other, but also to the textual rather
than the real.

When Hanson turns to the British decadents, he begins with Pater,
arguing that it is acceptable to read Pater as decadent, gay, and
Catholic although he was, technically, none of these things. Hanson
shows how Pater's work is haunted by a morbid melancholy and by a
fascination with the creative (even procreative) work of homoerotic
and autoerotic desires. This leads to a chapter on Pater's student
Wilde, who, Hanson argues, had a significant and complicated religious
faith which privileged beauty over truth and which incorporated a
Hellenized version of Christ. In this chapter, Hanson rambles off
on discussions of Tractarianism, Anglo-Catholicism, and anti-Papist
sentiments as well, subjects whose relevance is not particularly clear.
The final chapter is as wide-ranging as the first one, loosely focusing
on writers who produced 'priest and acolyte' stories but accomodating
a lengthy tangent on Andre Raffalovich (who did not). The primary
figures here are 'Baron Corvo' (Frederick Rolfe), John Gray, Montague
Summers, and Ronald Firbank.

Often Hanson's chapters demonstrate the ubiquity of Catholic images
more than they make any coherent or specific argument about those
images, but when he allows himself to focus on one writer he can come
up with compelling readings. His discussion of Pater's maternal imagery
is clever and persuasive, especially considering that Pater is so
notoriously difficult to discuss. I also learned something from his
argument that Wilde's fascination with confession is unrelated to
the presence of any real sin to confess.

Hanson's own writing style is evidently shaped by the jeweled prose
his subjects produced. The book is rife with witty or provocative
or lovely turns of phrase. Sometimes these moments are brief but perfect,
as when a chapter on Pater's fascination with virginal maternity and
death is entitled "Pater Dolorosa." Sometimes he daringly appropriates
his sources' language, as in a gorgeous "Conclusion" whose opening
and closing paragraphs are lifted, though with significant alterations,
from Pater's own "Conclusion." Sometimes Hanson writes with an almost
incantatory fervor, as in this passage: "The confession produces the
sin by virtue of its remorse or its impenitence. It produces the priest
by the solemnity of its transmission. It produces the confessional
by virtue of its whisper. It produces God by its expectation of forgiveness"
(294). The economy of expression and the denseness of thought in these
deceptively simple phrases reminds one, at moments, of Foucault.

But after a few hundred pages, one begins to wonder what the point
of this book really is. Hanson appears to be laboriously amassing
careful pieces of evidence for the sole purpose of convincing us that
gay Catholic decadent writers used gay, Catholic, and/or decadent
images in their writing. But in fact, the confluence of gay and Catholic
interests in fin-de-siècle writing is an old, well-worn truism.
Recently, Angela Leighton wrote, "The Catholic Church, with its erotic
rituals and emphasis on chastity, was the natural home of the aesthetes"
(Victorian Women Poets, 222). This one line tells us pretty
much everything Hanson takes nearly four hundred long pages to explain.

It is possible that the reason Hanson sees himself as fighting to
reveal a heretofore unacknowledged truth is that he remains unaware
of the extensive critical literature on the topic. Decadence and
Catholicism has no bibliography, so one must adduce Hanson's sources
from a very sketchy index. But the results of such an investigation
are somewhat surprising. Hanson does not seem to have read any of
the original histories of decadence and aestheticism: Holbrook Jackson's
The Eighteen Nineties (1913), Richard Le Gallienne's The
Romantic '90s (1925), Osbert Burdett's The Beardsley Period
(1925), and Max Beerbohm's satires (it is particularly odd to read
a whole section on Catholic satanism without encountering the hapless
Enoch Soames's "Catholic diabolism"). Nor does Hanson seem to have
read many of the modern critical texts. Hanson does not seem to know
about James Eli Adams's Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian
Masculinity (1995) or Alan Sinfield's The Wilde Century: Effeminacy,
Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment (1994), which cover precisely
the issues of dandyesque and decadent masculinity he cares about.
He never cites anything by Regenia Gagnier, although she is the preeminent
authority on aestheticism and Wilde. He seems ignorant of both Carolyn
Williams's crucial book on Pater (Transfigured World: Walter Pater's
Aesthetic Historicism,1989) and Jonathan Freedman's important
Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity
Culture (1990). He is capable of writing a whole section on the
life of Frederick Rolfe without using A.J.A. Symons's famous The
Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (1934), which is rather
like writing on Samuel Johnson without reading Boswell. Books on decadence
are also missing; where is David Weir's Decadence and the Making
of Modernism (1995), R.K.R. Thornton's The Decadent Dilemma
(1983), or Ian Fletcher's Decadence and the 1890s (1979)? Hanson
apparently has no idea that Martin Green has already traced Wilde's
legacy to 1920s dandies in Children of the Sun: A Narrative of
Decadence in England After 1918 (1976).

Equally problematically, Hanson generally cites other critics solely
to insist on his superiority to them. Only Eve Sedgwick and Richard
Dellamora escape unscathed. At one point, Hanson announces that "the
only kind thing I have to say about" Walter Benjamin's "The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" "is that, well, it is nicely
written. From the point of view of history, however, it strikes me
as absurd" (373). He condemns T.S. Eliot's "highly idiosyncratic and
unjust reading" of Pater (367). Jonathan Loesberg is "alarmingly inaccurate"
and "homophobic" (187), Jonathan Dollimore is self-contradictory (294),
Hilary Fraser undermines herself (384n19), Jean Pierrot "fails to
describe the texts or the lives of any of those writers we call decadent
and still read," except for an "alarmingly lame appraisal" of Flaubert
(15), John R. Reed "hardly does justice" to Wagner or decadents (30),
Guy Willoughby's book "is remarkable for its refusal to discuss sex,
history, or Wilde's life" (386). The cumulative effect is one of spitefulness,
not scholarship.

Unfortunately, Hanson's fundamental carelessness is visible not
just in his disregard for critical history, but also in his vague
and casual assumptions about his key terms. In a book called Decadence
and Catholicism, neither of those words is well defined.

Hanson's definition of decadence is a surpisingly vague one; he
seems content to assume that decadence was the same in Germany, France,
and Great Britain, that decadence and aestheticism were essentially
synonymous, and that all decadents were upper-class white males with
problematic masculinity (3). These positions could be defended, but
they are not. It does not seem to occur to Hanson that national and
cultural differences might inflect the movement differently (see Weir
for a description of how French decadisme differed from its
British counterpart). Hanson lists a number of potentially synonymous
terms, including Pre-Raphaelitism, aestheticism, symbolism, and impressionism,
only to announce that he defines decadence differently (2). Why? What
does his definition have to do with these other realms -- is he rejecting
them or constructing an overlapping category or arguing that they
all mean 'his' decadence? More care in distinguishing decadence from
its alternatives would have lent this category more credence.

I am also concerned about Hanson's decision to ignore all decadent
writers except for gay Catholic men. This misrepresents the real population
of the movement. It also seriously weakens his treatment of his own
subjects. If he wants to convince us that these men merged decadent
and Catholic styles to create a particular discourse, the best way
to do so is to compare them with others who wrote differently. Why
not read gay Catholic decadents like Verlaine, Huysmans, Pater, and
Wilde specifically against straight decadents (some of whom were Catholic)
-- Rosamund Marriott Watson, E.L. Voynich, Richard Le Gallienne, Max
Beerbohm, Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson, Henry Harland, 'John Oliver
Hobbes'? Or why not contrast gay decadents against lesbian decadents
(some of whom were Catholic too): Amy Levy, 'Vernon Lee,' 'Lucas Malet,'
'Michael Field'? Hanson does occasionally mention the aunt-niece couple
who formed 'Michael Field,' but he treats them just like 'one of the
boys,' apparently assuming that lesbians react just like gay men,
an odd blind spot for a work of contemporary queer theory. Since Michael
Field famously wrote "from decadence, Good Lord deliver us!", one
would think that they pose some challenge to Hanson's vision of a
seamlessly happy merging of decadent and homosexual ideals (Leighton,
217). As it is, however, we never know if Hanson is even aware of
the fact that he is studying only one subculture in a complex field.
Treating this coterie in isolation means we have no way to judge their
importance, their novelty, or their role in a larger culture.

Hanson treats Catholicism in an equally blinkered way. In Decadence
and Catholicism, there is no faith but Catholicism and these decadents
are its prophets. Hanson frequently uses 'Catholic' as a synonym for
'Christian,' slipping between these terms in the same paragraphs (68,
231, 368-369). Indeed, virtually any reference to souls, faith, religion,
guilt, spirit, or sin is triumphantly adduced as proof of underlying
Catholicism -- regardless of the fact that these terms were fashionable
in their own right in the nineteenth century or that they occupied
a common lexicon shared by anyone with religious training or operating
in the Anglican-based cultural environment of nineteenth-century Britain.
In Hanson's world, anyone with the slightest interest in the soul
must be a closet Catholic. Nor does he ever extend to other religions
the kind of respect he gives Catholicism. Any decadent man who is
not Catholic is just a proto-Catholic or a might-as-well-be Catholic,
with no understanding of how an upbringing in particular Protestant
denominations (or, in Raffalovich's case, in Judaism) might have specifically
shaped religious experience. This unremitting Catholic-centrism leads
him to make identifications that are unintentionally funny, as when
he calls Gilbert and Sullivan's "Patience" a "religious satire" (242)
-- presumably because "Patience" parodies the medieval revival, which
Hanson equates with ritualism, thus Anglo-Catholicism, and therefore
Catholicism itself.

While Hanson tends to spy Catholics under every bed, he is curiously
ambivalent about their faith. With an introduction and conclusion
sure to alienate Catholic scholars with its provocative attack on
the Church (amongst other things, he views the Church as a corporate
behemoth and "the bulwark of reactionary politics throughout the world"
(371)), he spends the rest of the book giving heartfelt, emotional
testimony about the power and beauty and necessity of what he calls
'the Faith' in a way sure to make poststructuralists uneasy. At times
his identification with Catholicism is so powerful that he strenously
fights long-dead battles on its behalf, as when he condemns Victorian
anti-Papist propaganda in the present tense, as if it were still a
major movement (263-264).

Along with these conceptual lacunae are a number of minor but grating
errors. Hanson explains that while some of Dorian Gray's sins are
explicit, his "opium addiction [is] hinted at if we are able to read
the signs" -- but nothing in that novel is more explicit than Dorian's
visit to an opium den (283-285). Hanson claims that Wilde "defined
for his age the dandy as Roman Catholic ritualist. The diabolical
aspect of the dandy's Catholicism is obvious enough" (246). Since
Wilde wasn't a Roman Catholic until his deathbed conversion (if one
accepts that he did convert, about which there are competing
accounts), and since he wasn't remotely diabolical, this is a truly
odd statement. In fact, Hanson goes on to adduce evidence which is
not about Wilde but about Barbey d'Aurevilly, decades earlier and
in a different country. In the final chapter, Hanson calls Rolfe "celibate"
though ten pages later he explains that Rolfe had sexual relations
with Venetian boys (332, 343). To make matters worse, Hanson then
claims that Rolfe only broke his vow of celibacy just before his death
(344). Which is it? A reading of Symons's biography could have helped
here.

In his conclusion, Hanson finally gives some reasons why he has
collected so much proof for something nobody doubted in the first
place. First, Hanson describes himself as writing about "the direction
that Christian thought took in English literature" (366). That would
be fine if there hadn't already been plenty of such histories. His
second motivation, however, is slightly more interesting. He sees
himself as attempting to reconcile homosexuality with Catholicism
by demonstrating how intimately they have been linked historically
(372). The ambition and grand daring sweep of such an attempt can
only be respected, and I wish Hanson had written the book he evidently
intended Decadence and Catholicism to be. But the project seems
to have gotten stuck in the phase of piling up evidence, never proceeding
to draw larger theoretical conclusions about the conceptual affinities
between these movements. Third, Hanson sees Decadence and Catholicism
as an attempt to provide a proud history for the 'gay aesthete' persona,
"Catholic and otherwise," highly visible in culture and academia and
the arts (374). This is a fairly modest goal, but he succeeds as far
as it goes. Certainly Hanson is not the first to claim that a modern
gay persona is descended from Wilde -- in fact it's hard to find Wilde
readers who don't believe this -- but being a truism does not make
it any less true, and his final chapter does demonstrate the lineage
persuasively.

It also occurred to me that there is an implicit theoretical question
in Decadence and Catholicism, of which Hanson himself is not
aware: can we use the structure of queer theory to investigate other
forms of identity? Decadence and Catholicism uses all the techniques
queer theory has taught us -- the careful, skeptical readings, the
hunting for half-buried hints, the sensitivity to nuance and double
meanings -- to seek out concealed religious identifications as well
as sexual ones. I'm not sure it always works here. For one thing,
the decadents about whom Hanson writes often performed their Catholicism
(and sometimes their homosexuality) quite flamboyantly, so that Hanson
often seems like a detective carefully using a magnifying glass to
locate an elephant in plain view. For another thing, religion may
not have the sort of transformative power over a text that sexuality
can have; if an author's religious affiliation is merely perfunctory
or facile, is it really worth going to great lengths to spy out? Nonetheless,
this would have been an interesting idea to explore.

At the end of Decadence and Catholicism, then, one can't
help but feel perplexed at this immersion in a closed universe where
all we are expected to do is register the irrefutable proof that gay
Catholic men were indeed gay and Catholic. The book is nicely written
and makes some rather good readings of Wilde and Pater. But on the
whole, Decadence and Catholicism is an enormous tome that wants
to be encylopedic but leaves out important decadents; that wants to
be theoretical but keeps getting stymied by its emotional attachments;
that hopes to rethink identities but doesn't offer any cogent definitions
of them; that wants to be a new word in criticism but appears ignorant
of most of the critical heritage; that aims to be important but can't
articulate that justification in any convincing or meaningful way.
At times, Decadence and Catholicism seems like four hundred
pages of evidence looking for an argument, and while such a book may
be useful to graduate students looking for a concatenation of primary
materials -- I confess to my own disappointment in finding that this
book, which could have been so important, fails in so many ways.